Ask HN: How to make job search better for both the applicant and the advertiser?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21898366

by kpandit • 7 years ago

17 20 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I am contemplating to start a job search website that connects the applicants directly to the companies. I have a few ideas that will make it a good deal for both companies as well as for job applicants e.g. merging duplicate CV submission by competing recruiters, geo-fencing of job applications, first class support for remote and freelance jobs etc.

However most of it sounds so commonsensical that I wonder why it hasn't been done already. Perhaps I am trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

So I wanted to know how you see the current situation with job sites (linkedin, stack overflow careers, indeed, monster and plenty others). I have anecdotal evidence that candidates hate the polluted/obfuscated job advertisements while hiring managers are sick of receiving far too many unsuitable CV's.

What do you think is broken with the status quo and how/what could/should be improved?

All views for or against the venture are equally appreciated.

P.S. I am aware of the enormity of the challenge of entering a very competitive market and terrible odds of success. For now I am just looking at the problem as a problem solver and not as a sound investment.

shinryuu• 7 years ago

An idea, perhaps you remember the idea of charging a small amount for each email you sent to prevent spammers.

Perhaps that same idea could applied to job applications. For a firm that believes that they get too many applications they would introduce a cost to sending an application.

Conversely, there would be a cost introduced if a firm wanted to headhunt an applicant.

Whether this would work in practice I don't know though :)

kpandit9• 7 years ago

Thanks Shinryuu. I see the point in imposing a cost to avoid spam but I am afraid the real good candidates wouldn't even bother applying if they were asked for a payment before their application could be moved forward. There is some obvious spam that could be weeded out easily with a bit of tech e.g. geo-fencing applications and perhaps there are other ways too.

Similarly I wouldn't want to get in the way of a company that wants to reach out to a willing applicant. In fact putting two interested parties together is the very motivation for this project. Making it expensive for a candidate to apply or for a company to get in touch with the candidate may not necessarily improve things. In such a system the bad actors with money will thrive and i am afraid that doesn't improve the status quo in a meaningful way.

BossingAround• 7 years ago

I really like Linkedin for a simple reason of showing me which big companies operate and are hiring in my city/country. I would never have guessed that some companies operate over here (e.g. Oracle).

I then also really like one local website that shows which startups are hiring. The tone of the ads is very different, and there are no huge companies like Oracle or HP, but a ton of companies I don't even know existed.

What I think are gimmicks that won't work:

- asking candidates for tech skills and matching them with skill requirements of a job ad (been done a million times, never works for anything more than superficial word matching)

- trying to pre-screen candidates so that you can boast great quality of job applicants (I'll simply browse your companies and apply directly to them, not bothering with your system. If I can't see the companies, I'll pass. I'm not desperate to waste time on your skill checks)

- Not showing names of the 'amazing companies' who put the ads on your site (been done a few times, a useless gimmick, I'd never respond to an unknown company unless I were desperate for a job).

What I would love:

- Set up a "follow a company" watcher so that it gives me a breakdown of "these are the job positions opened/closed within the last $time_period", "they started hiring X% more of $position", etc. Simply data about company, or even a city. I would pay for that feature, provided the site was large enough to have meaningful statistics.

kpandit9• 7 years ago

Thanks BossingAround. I fully agree with the gimmicks that you mention as infeasible. One of the triggers for this whole idea is the jobs post that start with something like "For one of the biggest cloud provider in the world I am looking for XYZ talent".

However, I am not sure about the feature you said that you would love. It seems some kind of a research tool to measure a company rather than something that helps someone in his/her job search. Pretty useful to keep an eye on your competition and I do this myself on linkedin very regularly but not sure of its utility for someone who is looking for a job. Of course I have just started to think about it so not very sure of my own thoughts. Thanks again for your sharing thoughts.

ksec• 7 years ago

What do you think is broken with the status quo and how/what could/should be improved?

Unpopular Opinion.

I used to think there were something broken in the system, procedure or policy during the first 8-10 years stepping in to the Job Market and society. First 10 years you are likely the Job Seeker, and wonder why does Job Seeking sucks, why the interview and flow sucks. Next 10 years you are now in the position to scan and look for candidate sitting on the other side of the table. You starting to wonder why so many candidate lied about their achievement and how the scanning system doesn't really work.

So After all these years, I am now convinced nothing is broken or inherently wrong in the system or procedure. But the people operating it are far from perfect.

I am sorry I dont have any actionable plan. A lot of people often question why I give another glimpse or negativity to the problem. But I argued if I had a solution I would have done it myself, I am merely trying to help and offer a little more thoughts or perspective.

kpandit9• 7 years ago

That's perfectly alright ksec. Perhaps it is not a technical problem but a people problem. Or even a system problem that turns people into lying job seekers and unreasonable employers. Perhaps another manifestation of the same phenomena that PG wrote about recently[1]. I can see why job seekers inflate their CVs. They have to do what everybody else is doing. Just like all companies have to be agile, innovative and have flat hierarchies.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html

joezydeco• 7 years ago

You want to be a quantum leap ahead of LinkedIn and the others?

Enforce communication between registered recruiters and applicants. If they don’t answer a query or application within 1 business day - the listing is yanked. Doesn’t have to be a yes or no, just an acknowledgement.

If they’re out of office, the listing is offline until someone is back.

If the listing is a relocation, it’s marked in bold on the front of the search.

And this is just for starters.

kpandit9• 7 years ago

Wow. This one has escaped my attention till now but seems like a very valid ask indeed. Thanks Joezydeco.

cm2012• 7 years ago

I love this

randomsearch• 7 years ago

Something I hear developers moaning about all the time: not listing compensation. (This is outside the SV bubble and a wide range of salaries are available, some very low).

kpandit9• 7 years ago

To be honest, this is one of the first things on my list. A company should not be able to advertise a job without disclosing at least how much they will pay. That is pretty much the first question any potential recruit will have on their mind whether they inquire about it or not.

yellow_lead• 7 years ago

I will give you a couple recommendations:

- Filter out "CyberCoders", "Robert Half", etc recruiting firms. These make it hard to view jobs especially when I get shown descriptions lifted from my own company's postings.

- Some alerting mechanism that doesn't just spam me every day. For instance, I would like to look through new postings with descriptions that match certain keywords. Any existing site today just spams me with anything containing "software" or "computer" in the description.

kpandit9• 7 years ago

Thanks yellow_lead. Both very valid points. #2 is almost a basic necessity but yes you are right that many website don't do it properly. Probably they measure the number of emails sent and try to optimise that.

itronitron• 7 years ago

Who is your customer and what are you providing for them? If your customer is the job advertiser then do they want fewer to apply, more to apply, or the best to apply? If your customer is the job applicant then how are you saving them time or reducing risk?

I like that you are focusing on the common sense aspects, if you get the basics right then I think you will be off to a good start.

A good initial start for your site would be to standardize the amount and type of information for each job advertisement so that applicants have an easier time comparing them.

kpandit9• 7 years ago

Thanks itronitron. I look at both the applicant and the job advertiser as my customers. I want to take the frustration out of the job application process by making it very easy for an applicant to apply and for an advertiser to scan that application in a second.

Thanks for the suggestion regarding minimising the information in a job advert. I had thought of standardising the CV with minimal info but didn't realise that same applies to the job adverts as well.

chrisbennet• 7 years ago

I think the root cause of the problems with job boards, is the recruiters are the customers and the applicants are product. Any business is going to favor their source of income.

kpandit9• 7 years ago

I agree with your assessment. That's why I am trying to explore the possibilities without looking at the money aspect of it at all. Thanks for your comment.

jlokier2• 7 years ago

One of the biggest issues for me, browsing jobs and contracts on LinkedIn and elsewhere as a candidate/freelancer/consultant is this:

Most job ads (and incoming messages) are from recruiters, who:

- completely obfuscate what the product or service is

- thoroughly obfuscate what the work is

- often obfuscate where the work actually is

- virtually always obfuscate who it's with

- replace what I want to know with details of the tech stack, beer days, etc. which, though maybe important, aren't the most important things

- talk up weirdly irrelevant things like "you will review code, meet weekly to discuss requirements, blah blah". Sure, I'd expect something like that in the job, but it sounds like filler in an ad which omits the distinctive items I actually want to know.

While these are understandable given the recruiters' needs, the effect is that 99% of all ads I see go immediately into my "doesn't sound interesting" pile.

Meanwhile, I read complaints that it's hard to find good engineers these days. Well if you can't be bothered to say what the company makes, perhaps it's not surprising that good engineers ignore your ad among a sea of equally generic ads?

I'm pretty sure both the companies and recruiters would rather their ads be taken more seriously, but the way they write them just doesn't work for people like me.

To use an analogy, property listings that say a room is for rent sometimes neglect to say which part of a large town or how much the rent is. Surely those listings can't be very successful.

Naturally, most jobs won't be interesting for appropriate reasons; we're all looking for different things. That's fine.

The problem is, I'm pretty sure the number of actually interesting and worthwhile jobs is much higher than the number which is detectable from the unhelpful ads, and most of the effort of browsing and making queries is a big waste of everyone's time.

There are some basics I'd always want to know, which other comments mention. For example pay ceiling, relocation, etc.

But setting aside things which are that obvious, the #1 thing I'm looking for in ads is, what is the product or service I'd be helping to create or maintain, so I can decide whether it's something I'd feel good working on.

For that reason, company-oriented sites like AngelList, HN's Who's Hiring and so on are much more interesting than the ads on LinkedIn and Indeed. However, I browse LinkedIn mainly, because the website and app are pretty good compared with others, and I can see stats and information about people working there that I can't get elsewhere.

Another comment suggested standardising some information in job ads, to help candidates compare jobs. That sounds like it could be interesting, and if done well it might nudge ad writers towards providing the kind of information they don't currently think to provide. (LinkedIn is good at this for people's profiles, but doesn't seem to be doing it for job ads). I suspect some of the ad genericness is just out of habit, with people copying ad styles from other ads in a hurry, not knowing how to present jobs effectively to selectively get the attention of the most appropriate candidates.

Lastly, one thing I've found unhelpfully weak on LinkedIn is better tracking of the status and priority of active conversations, and of relatively interesting messages. There's basically one linear mailbox, with no tagging or folders, and once there are a number of active, slow conversations, with people I don't know (usually recruiters but sometimes from companies), mixed with lots of low-quality messages (which I often reply to as well to say no thanks), it gets rather hard to track which ones I should stay on top of.

Most of those are back-and-forth conversations where I've been approached and then I'm trying to find out if it's interesting, because invariably the first incoming message to me is uninformative, and often so is the second. Because it's surprisingly common to get a cold but personalised incoming approach, I reply quickly, and get no reply, or I get a reply but after a week, or it takes me a few days to decide what to say, or they have asked for more detailed info about me that I don't have time to do when I first see their message, I need tools to help me remember which ones are in which state, and on LI I find myself scrolling through that long, linear list over and over.

Questions asked to me like "would you be willing to relocate to X" are not questions I can answer quickly, because I have to talk it other with other people first and that may take days. So that's another reason the LI linear message list is not a great tool.

kpandit9• 7 years ago

Thanks jlokier for taking the time to give your perspective. I guess generic nature of many job descriptions comes from the fact that you are forced to have a job description. When I talk to friends they will usually say something like they are looking for a good java developer but the same guys while writing the job description will write a page full of fluff just to make the job ad look legit. Thanks for your other comment too.

jlokier2• 7 years ago

Some criteria I'd love to be able to search on (as a candidate/freelancer/consultant) are:

- Are they looking for someone urgently?

- Contract duration (if contract)?

- Fixed hours, slightly flexible, or extremely flexible "just get the project done" B2B style?

- Travel time if on site (by train - I don't want to drive).

- Quick start or lengthy interview process?

- Remote, some remote, or not at all?

- The compensation, or range.

- If equity is involved, do the math for me about how much it's really worth, by some standardised criteria.

- Would they be interested part-time to get particular expertise, even if they are looking for someone full-time ideally?

- Do they care about regular hours like most jobs, or would they be happy with a "this is the thing that needs doing, you figure out how" self-managed style?

- What is the field of work (not the tech stack). For example, I may know it's a (say) cybersecurity job, but I'd like to rule out some fields from (say) security of medical devices, social science research, food distribution, gambling sites, adtech, warships, etc. Ideally I could search by field or broader categories (even "civilian" would be a start) so I don't waste my time on things I know I'm not going to want to work on.

I try to search for thngs like that using clever keyword combinations, but it's not very effective.

LinkedIn's job filter refinement is quite good for this, but it doesn't cover all the categories I'd use. In LI, like with Ebay, given a current search resultset, it shows multiple-choice lists of properties that you can select a subset of to refine the search.

I wonder if something like OkCupid's old matching system would be good between companies and candidates for some kinds of work. In that system, the questions not only ask your answer from a multiple choice, they ask what your ideal match would answer, and how important each answer is, and the set of questions evolved, using a kind of statistical engine to deduce which questions were most effective for discriminating good and bad matches.

Things like geo-fencing, remote, freelance etc. would then not need to be pre-programmed specially, since they would tend to emerge via the statistical engine as high quality discriminators anyway. The most interesting bit is other high quality discriminators we haven't thought of may emerge as well (that happened on OkCupid, which is why the site became popular for "non mainstream" users).

To my mind the company-candidate matching process is mostly blocked on low quality of matching right now, which is why we have many candidates blasting out large numbers of queries or applications, at the same time as many companies blasting out job ads and yet both sides complain of a shortage of good matches and lots of wasted time.

Ask HN: How to make job search better for both the applicant and the advertiser?

Related Stories